Poetic Imagination in Black Africa

Poetic Imagination in Black Africa
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 180
Release :
ISBN-10 : UVA:X004068490
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis Poetic Imagination in Black Africa by : Tanure Ojaide

In this book, Tanure Ojaide explains the uniqueness of modern African poetry, which he sees as a product of African orature and the Western literary tradition. The volume fittingly begins with "African Literature and Cultural Identity," which establishes areas of cultural identity of modern African literature in general. The next chapter strives to define modern African poetic aesthetics. The book then examines both the oral and the rhythmic aspects of modern African poetry. Having established the defining characteristics of modern African poetry, Ojaide takes on the history of the art form. "The Changing Voice of History: Contemporary African Poetry" and "New Trends in Modern African Poetry" contrast the newer poetry to that of the older generation while acknowledging the influence of the old on the new. The book then goes on to highlight African women's poetry and compare African-American poetry with modern African poetry. After the author -- himself a poet -- talks about his background and generation, the collection concludes with "Poetic Imagination in Black Africa." Ojaide brings the intuitive knowledge of a practitioner and scholar to his literary criticism of poetry, examining and interpreting modern African poems with lucidity, passion, and freshness. His knowledge of American and English literatures allows him to make apt comparisons and bring out the uniqueness of modern African poetry. Touching on the themes, techniques, and other areas, Poetic Imagination in Black Africa will help readers achieve a deeper understanding of the complex and diverse world of modern African poetry.

The African Imagination

The African Imagination
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages : 324
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0195086198
ISBN-13 : 9780195086195
Rating : 4/5 (98 Downloads)

Synopsis The African Imagination by : Abiola Irele

This collection of essays from eminent scholar F. Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an "African imagination" manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampat B , and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as a whole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.

The New African Poetry

The New African Poetry
Author :
Publisher : Three Continents
Total Pages : 233
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0894108913
ISBN-13 : 9780894108914
Rating : 4/5 (13 Downloads)

Synopsis The New African Poetry by : Tanure Ojaide

This anthology presents the voices of a new generation of African poets, drawn from across the continent and representing a wide range of themes, styles and ideologies. These contemporary voices have been shaped in the realities of postcolonial Africa from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1990s.

The Black Mind

The Black Mind
Author :
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages : 541
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781452912288
ISBN-13 : 1452912289
Rating : 4/5 (88 Downloads)

Synopsis The Black Mind by : Oscar Ronald Dathorne

The Black Maria

The Black Maria
Author :
Publisher : BOA Editions, Ltd.
Total Pages : 122
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781942683032
ISBN-13 : 1942683030
Rating : 4/5 (32 Downloads)

Synopsis The Black Maria by : Aracelis Girmay

Taking its name from the moon's dark plains, misidentified as seas by early astronomers, The Black Maria investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Central to this project is a desire to recognize the lives of Eritrean refugees who have been made invisible by years of immigration crisis, refugee status, exile, and resulting statelessness. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry, Girmay's newest collection elegizes and celebrates life, while wrestling with the humanistic notion of seeing beyond: seeing violence, seeing grace, and seeing each other better. "to the sea" great storage house, history on which we rode, we touched the brief pulse of your fluttering pages, spelled with salt & life, your rage, your indifference your gentleness washing our feet, all of you going on whether or not we live, to you we bring our carnations yellow & pink, how they float like bright sentences atop your memory's dark hair Aracelis Girmay is the author of two poetry collections, Teeth and Kingdom Animalia, which won the Isabella Gardner Award and was a finalist for the NBCC Award. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Jerome, Cave Canem, and Watson foundations, as well as Civitella Ranieri and the NEA. She currently teaches at Hampshire College's School for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University's low residency MFA program. Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.

Futurism and the African Imagination

Futurism and the African Imagination
Author :
Publisher : Routledge Studies in African Philosophy
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1032015691
ISBN-13 : 9781032015699
Rating : 4/5 (91 Downloads)

Synopsis Futurism and the African Imagination by : Dike Okoro

This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics.

The Black Interior

The Black Interior
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 242
Release :
ISBN-10 : UCSC:32106017074607
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (07 Downloads)

Synopsis The Black Interior by : Elizabeth Alexander

With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence. Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.

Ethiopia Unbound

Ethiopia Unbound
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 278
Release :
ISBN-10 : STANFORD:36105041533857
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Synopsis Ethiopia Unbound by : Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford

Black Imagination

Black Imagination
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1944211845
ISBN-13 : 9781944211844
Rating : 4/5 (45 Downloads)

Synopsis Black Imagination by : Natasha Marin

"Close your eyes--make the white gaze disappear." What is it like to be black and joyful, without submitting to the white gaze? This question, and its answer, is at the core of Black Imagination, a dynamic collection collection curated by artist and poet Natasha Marin. Born from a series of exhibitions and fueled by the power of social media (#blackimagination), the collection includes work from a range of voices who offer up powerful individual visions of happiness and safety, rituals and healing. Black Imagination presents an opportunity to understand the joy of blackness without the lens of whiteness.

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (LOA #333)

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (LOA #333)
Author :
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781598536669
ISBN-13 : 1598536664
Rating : 4/5 (69 Downloads)

Synopsis African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (LOA #333) by : Kevin Young

A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young’s fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems. Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Room Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.